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From the Ether

A recent article on Tech Republic caught my eye. It notes that while the efficiency of open-source has been leveraged by companies large and small, there is only one company that has actually capitalized on this space. The company is of course Red Hat and it's business model around support and services of open-source software. This is even after heavy hitters Oracle and IBM put up fierce competition, Red Hat's portfolio of applications and support have allowed grow and stay competitive.

I disagree with this sentiment and belief that open-source of course is more about making a certain company exist. Moreover, Red Hat has been successful due to it's secret sauce of providing exceptional support and services that allows enterprises to focus on other areas. It feels that the writer just calling them a "open-source company" discredits their work.

There's been a revolution in the open-source community in terms of projects and use cases for open-source that has gone beyond nominal value. For example, the Busybox toolkit is a popular choice for a lot of IoT (more like IoD or Internet of disasters from the recent headlines) and embedded applications. The blockchain technology powering bitcoin is being looked at by NASDAQ and other enterprises as a way to improve existing technology. Small development kits like Arduino and Raspberry Pi have grown organically and the capability of these systems is only possible because of the open-source application ecosystem.

Open-source has gone beyond a wish and a manifesto from Richard Stallman in 1985. A quote from Marc Andreessen said "software is eating the world" but I believe this should be changed to "open-source software is eating the world." It the upcoming IoT and cloud dependent world, more and more open-source software will be working behind the scenes to power more of the gadgets that run our lives. Isn't this more important than open-source just allowing a company to profit?